Free The Haunting of Maddy Clare by Simone St. James

had found our machine, and somehow, she had broken it.

Chapter Seven

    T here is little to say about the rest of that day, or so I sometimes think to myself. That is to say, we did not have any further supernatural visitations, and no more strangers appeared at the window. And yet there is one incident from that day that I have left to tell. It seemed like nothing—should have been nothing—and yet I find it nearly the hardest to tell.
    Mr. Ryder worked furiously, and with a great many obscene oaths, to fix the machine’s recording apparatus. He didn’t succeed. Mr. Gellis retreated to his room to type his notes. We ate. At some point, I went to my bed and slept.
    I did not dream of ghosts; instead I dreamed, strangely, about Mrs. Barry, the fashionable woman I had seen walking her dog that morning. In my dream she stood at the edge of the woods where the strange man had been, holding a cigarette, but I knew the cigarette was somehow terribly dangerous, and she should not touch it. As she raised it to her lips, I tried to scream.
    I woke groggy and confused. The light in the room was failingaround me, and as I wiped the sweat from my face, I realized it was nearly night. My body felt heavy and my head ached. Reluctantly, I got out of bed.
    I stepped out into the hallway, heading for the washroom. The inn was very small, and we were the only guests; though the place was usually quiet, it was especially so now. It was the end of the dinner hour, and from the soft murmur of voices from the downstairs common room I could tell that everyone in the building except myself could likely be found there. The guest hallway was utterly deserted.
    I padded down the hall under the dim light, touching the dark oak walls with my fingertips to guide my way. The quiet settled about me, the comfortable peace of a house inhabited by people in a far-off room, and I felt very private, as if I were invisible.
    The washroom door stood ajar, with no light within. I approached silently and pulled it open. Then I stood, rooted to the spot, taking in what I saw there with a shock that reverberated through all of my body.
    There are large moments in life; but sometimes it is the small moments—the casual moments—that change everything. The second’s absent wandering of attention before an accident. The choice to take one road, instead of another. I could not pinpoint exactly how everything changed the second I opened that washroom door; I knew only, and instantly, it seemed, that nothing in my life would ever be the same.
    Mr. Ryder stood in the washroom. He was standing before the mirror, a flannel in his hand. He had the flannel pinched between his forefinger and thumb, and pressed tightly between his eyes, to the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed, his jaw clenched, as if he was in the extremes of pain.
    He wore only trousers; his feet and chest were bare. He was turned partly away from me, and did not see me in that first instant. I glimpsed his discarded white shirt, tossed carelessly over the old radiator. But, mostly, I saw him.
    Spread across his sleekly muscled back and down his right arm, which pulsed with lean, raw strength, was an enormous, dark pink burn scar. It ravaged the skin of his shoulder blades, up to the close-cropped hair on the back of his neck; it twisted its way down, through the dip of his lower back, to the waistband of his trousers. The flesh even on his rib cage and under his arm was tortured with fire, and the arm itself was scored and angry, the skin tight and painful, down and down unto the wrist and the back of his hand, the edge of which I realized I had glimpsed as he handed me my cup of tea.
    It was hideous, horrible, the most terrible scar I had ever seen, marring his body so utterly that it looked as if he were even now consumed with flame. The image of him shocked me—nearly naked, utterly still, his body a testament to unimaginable torture. I stepped back, and my back hit the wall. I may have made